Chinese
Box
Reviewed
by Leonard Heldreth, June, 1999
Perhaps because
he always looks slightly repressed and bothered by it, Jeremy
Irons also stars in this film by Wayne Wang (director of The Joyluck
Club, Smoke and Blue in the Face–the latter two reviewed in this
column). The setting is Hong Kong in the first half of 1997 when the
British were turning the former Crown Colony over to the Chinese from
the mainland. This episodic film follows a British financial journalist
named John (Irons) and his interactions with a variety of people during
the six months from New Year's Eve to July 1.
John has loved Vivian (Gong Li) for years but she wants
to marry Chang (Michael Hui), a successful Chinese businessman who
introduces Vivian as his business partner. John, who does not talk
about the wife and children he left in England, finds that Vivian
also has a dark past, and its revelation changes their relationship.
John also encounters Jean (Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung),
a scarf-covered street peddler who agrees to videotape the story of
her life if John will pay her. When she refuses to explain the scars
that disfigure one side of her face, John searches the newspaper archives
and finds out for himself. Finally, she tells what she says is the
true story and takes John to the places where it happened. Then, to
give the screw a further twist, John tracks down a witness to her
story, but he doesn't remember most of what Jean recalls.
A third character, Jim (Ruben Blades), a journalist who
temporarily lives at John's apartment, provides some continuity and
a kind of musical chorus to what the other characters say. Another
element that tightens the melodramatic screws is John's discovery
that he has leukemia and may not last as long as the British in Hong
Kong.
The symbolism is heavy at times—Irons, Li, and Cheung
representing the dying British rule, the China with an ignoble past,
and the street-savvy and dynamic Hong Kong—but the symbols and
the melodramatic death by "a strange form of leukemia" are
offset by shots of daily city life that layer the symbolism with a
gritty reality—people shopping and eating, venders selling produce
and still twitching meat, traffic clogging the streets.
These characters wander in and out of John's life, trying
to make sense of what is happening to them as well as understand what
is happening to Hong Kong as the government changes. At one point
John says he is looking for "something that is not here today
and gone tomorrow," to which another character replies, "You
won't find that in Hong Kong." The plot is not tightly structured
and the emotions become a bit sentimental at times, but the low-key
performances set against the exotic background are an effective combination.
Vivian pantomiming to a Marlene Dietrich song stands out. Some of
the camera work is striking, as when only half of Jean's face is shown,
the unscarred side, implying that only a part of Hong Kong is also
being revealed. Various television monitors spout interviews and news,
each of which tells only part of the story; in the case of two suicides
who protested the Chinese takeover with their deaths, it records the
grandiose but ultimately inconsequential acts. John seems to be equally
fascinated by a dog which runs all day on a treadmill to build endurance
and pulls weights to build its muscles so that it can fight for its
owners.
The title seems to refer to the reality of Hong Kong which
can never be completely understood, for the city opens with the complexity
of a Chinese box, and the realities of its inhabitants often do not
overlap. The acting is solid throughout, but Maggie Cheung's Jean
is the most vibrant and interesting character. Director Wayne Wang
(named after John Wayne), a Hong Kong native who has spent much of
his life in California, seems to using the departure of the British
as a way of looking at his own mixed feelings about the city. Despite
some of its contrivances, Chinese Box is a fascinating film, especially
if you can live with the ideas that most answers are always tentative
and that reality is just your version of things.
